Illia Polosukhin

And one of the challenges we had was because we didn't have much compute, we were trying to get better data.

So what we did, we went out and got a bunch of computer science students to work with us to give us training data by coding stuff, by describing code, etc.,

And we had challenge paying them.

They were in China, they were in Eastern Europe, you know, Southeast Asia, all the places is kind of lower, like lower income, but also challenges with banking, right?

So in China, students don't actually have bank accounts.

They have WeChat Pay.

I'm from Ukraine.

Right.

Even before the war, you needed to sell half of your dollars in arrival into bank.

It's like super, super complicated.

Oh, wow.

You know, nothing worked with Russia even back then.

Like, you couldn't do PayPal, you couldn't do, et cetera.

Like, every country has some kind of complexity.

And we were like, hey, you know,

This is super annoying.

Like as developers who are trying to do something else, you're like, why are we dealing with all this payments infrastructure?

And so we started looking at blockchain to just fix that.

Like, hey, this global payment network, right?

That's what blockchain is.